Mom’s just left for errands, and the dog is already dropping from missing her. There’s only one seat under the window, and I’m sitting in it. After inquisitively poking at me and me not moving, he hops up on the other couch and cranes his neck around, attempting to look out the window.

After a minute or two, I take the hint and trade places with him.

Whereupon he promptly flopped down on my recently warmed seat.

Apparently, he’d never wanted to look out the window at all, he just wanted my warm spot!

I did a lot of theatre in high school. Following what ended up being my final show, my grandparents bought me a small bouquet of roses. I absolutely love the flowers and end up gushing about them to my parents after going home for the night.

Me: “I was smiling like an idiot. Usually I just make myself sad by checking the flower buckets and candy gram bins, but Grandma and Grandpa came up to me after the show and gave me them!”

I’m smiling too hard to notice my parents’ expressions of horrified guilt. My school sets up a table during intermission for audience members, usually families, to cheaply buy either candy or a fresh rose for an actor, to be delivered to the green room with a name card and sometimes a note. My family has never even been near this table.

Dad: “Those things really mean that much to you?”

Me: “Yeah, but I haven’t gotten anything since my first [high school] show!”

The look of guilt only intensifies. I believe they are remembering exactly how many shows I was in since my first high school play in freshman year, and how many times I probably checked the candy boxes and flower buckets for anything with my name on it, sifting through dozens of candy boxes and flower tags with no luck. The gifts from my first show were sent by a handful of people I’d only met briefly a few weeks before who happened to be at the play.

Mom: “I am so sorry, we thought that you’d think they were useless and you’d think we were wasting money.”

I never did another show after that, but if I ever get back into acting, I fully believe that they’ll be waiting in the audience with a piece of candy or a rose.

(Back when VCRs were the way to record TV, my parents taught me to record my TV shows at a young age–probably four or five, as I was still in preschool. One of my favorite princess movies is set to show with a talk by the “real” princess, so I, of course, set the VCR to record with a fresh tape. Once the movie is over, I mark the side with the title–or at least I think I do. I can read a little, but my writing is much worse. To make matters worse, the title of the movie was in fancy script with lots of squiggles that I attempted to replicate. Because my writing is small and only on one side of the label, when my parents find the tape, they only think I’ve drawn on it. A few weeks later, I hear my parents arguing.)

Dad: You recorded over my football game.

Mom: I did?

Dad: Yes! I wrote the date on the side!

(I’m curious and come over to investigate. They continue arguing while I take a look at the tape. I see my scribble and instantly recognize my label, which sends me into tears.)

Dad: What’s wrong, [My Name]?

Me: You recorded over my movie!

(Both of my parents felt pretty bad after that and learned to understand that the “scribbles” were my attempts to label my own tapes.)

My girlfriend and I are on our way from Maryland to New York City for a short vacation. By the time we are ready to check into our motel across the river in New Jersey, I’m pretty low on gas and I decided to fill up before we check in so we don’t have to waste time doing so tomorrow when we start touring. For those of you who don’t know, it used to be illegal nation wide for customers to pump their own fuel from gas stations; pumps weren’t as safe and reliable as they are now so it was unsafe for untrained personnel to operate them. While most states have overturned the laws preventing gas pumps from being self-served, New Jersey is the final hold out that requires it to be done by an attendant. Oregon used to have the same restrictions but they overturned that law shortly after the below incident.

We pull into the station and I pull up to the pump closest to the man sitting in a chair in the middle of the station. I recognize him as the station attendant but my girlfriend was apparently, unfamiliar with this New Jersey law. The man is rather scruffy and obese and I suppose he looked suspicious to a girl in a strange new city. As I pull up, he stands and looks down at me expectantly.

Girlfriend: *Alarmed* “Wait, don’t stop here! There’s some guy just sitting there! Why are you stopping by him!?”

Me: *Laughing* “That’s the gas station attendant. It is still illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey and Oregon so they have to have an employee do it.”

Girlfriend: *Settling back in her chair and chuckling sheepishly* “Oh…”

Me: *Rolls down the window and hands the man my credit card* “Fill it up with regular, please.”

I’m the author of the story, Orange Is The New Black, on here
https://notalwaysright.com/orange-is-the-new-black-2/159893/
I got to say that creativity and big personalities run in that swimmer’s family because I have a funny story of Rainbow Metal Princess’s 7 year-old little brother.

This past summer we had to run a dryland only practice one day because when we got to the pool to set up we found out that a pump broke and the chlorine levels were dangerously high. As coaches we tried our best to let parents know that we weren’t allowed to get in the water so send your kids with sneakers for dryland or don’t send your kid to swim practice. Those swimmers who still came were spread out on the grass area of our outdoor pool and we started doing relay races with random callisthenic exercises. Things like crab walks, wheel barrels, skipping, inch worms, and bear crawls.

For those of you who don’t know, bear crawls are difficult and exhausting. You have to run on all fours, meaning your hands and feet, with your butt up in the air. It looks very similar to how big brown bears look when they run which is why the exercise is called a bear crawl. After a couple of rounds of bear crawls this 7 year-old boy came up to me.

Swimmer: Coach, do we have to do bear crawls the way you showed us?

Me: Do you know a different way to crawl like a bear?

Swimmer: *with all the confidence in the world* Yes, I know how they run.

Me: Okay then, why don’t you do a bear run on this next race.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was not having a swarm of 7 year-old boys wide leg squatting with hands in claws up above their heads and rawering as they sprinted across the grass in that half squat position.

I can’t wait to see what this family’s kids come up with during this coming summer.